many instances of apache get spawned with Passenger/Rails

Question

Hello,

I have a Debian Linux VPS server for my production website (512MB).

I'm using Phusion Passenger with Apache to service my Rails 2.3.4 application with Ruby 1.9. I'm limiting the pool of Phusion passenger instances to 3

Although the traffic is relatively low, the server crashes at times and I notice (when using 'top' command) that there are many instances of apache (/usr/sbin/apache2 -k start) maybe like 20 of them taking up all the memory I have and the website become un-responsive.

I'm not sure what to do about this, where to start digging for potential issues or how to spot or limit the number of apache instances.

Thanks,

Tam

Answer 1

If you want to limit the number of Apache processes, look at the documentation for the Multi-Processing Modules. But if you don't have that much traffic (it depends on what you call "relatively low"), it should work out of the box.

Have you tried asking your question over at Server Fault ? You might get better answers there.